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Huge Methane Pool Found Under Ocean

LONDON, BRITAIN — American scientists said Wednesday that they have found a tantalizing new energy source in vast stores of methane locked beneath the ocean floor.

Writing in the science journal Nature, they said they found a reservoir of methane in the form of a solid gas hydrate equivalent to about 15 billion tons of carbon in the Blake ridge of the western Atlantic.

Underneath that, to their surprise, they found at least the same amount of methane in the form of gas bubbles amid the sediment.

"The 35 billion tons of methane carbon . . . could meet the United States' 1996 natural gas consumption rate for the next 105 years," said Gerald Dickens of the University of Michigan.

Theoretically, methane in hydrate form could be used as natural gas.

Unfortunately, the scientists have not yet found a way of getting the methane out of the earth in a usable form.